Boston Dynamics’ latest robot can clean up your house

Watch out for banana peels, but if you can keep your floor clean, Boston Dynamics' new robot, Spot Mini, is capable of navigating around your home, loading the dishwasher, throwing rubbish in the bin and avoiding your feet as it sneaks under the table. Just don't feed it scraps, you don't want to get it into any bad habits.

Showing similar advancements to the latest version of Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot which we saw earlier this year, Spot Mini is smaller, lighter, faster and more capable than its predecessors – we even see it crawling under its older brother. It can navigate various floor surfaces, avoid obstacles of various sizes and even get a little handsy with its arm attachment. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng']

Admittedly the ‘eyes' look a little creepy and the way it moves has almost a predatory feel to the stillness of its arm/hand extender, but it's nonetheless impressively capable. Watching it load a glass into the dishwasher was surprisingly nuanced. The way it was able to right itself from a fall and climb the stairs with ease, shows have far along this sort of technology has come.

A more consumer friendly-looking version appears right at the end of the video and you can really start to get an understanding of how this sort of robot technology could be used in a future.

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KitGuru Says: It seems inevitable that hardware like this will one day help us out at home. As it becomes lighter, smarter and more capable, there could be no end to what something like SpotMini v X.0 could handle. I feel like a four legged version like this could be more easily accepted around humans than a bipedal one too.

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